Quotes About Choice

Once having understood Hell, researched it, so to speak—particularly your own individual Hell—you could decide against going there or creating that. You could aim elsewhere.

For Jung, whatever was at the top of an individual's moral hierarchy was, for all intents and purposes, that person's ultimate value, that person's god. It was what the person acted out. It was what the person believed most deeply. Something enacted is not a fact, or even a set of facts. Instead, it's a personality—or, more precisely, a choice between two opposing personalities.

not everyone who is failing is a victim, and not everyone at the bottom wishes to rise,

He chose rebirth over descent into Hell.

Ver es algo muy difícil, así que tienes que elegir qué ver y obviar lo demás.

And this is an amazing thing: the answer is already implicit in Genesis 1: to embody the Image of God—to speak out of chaos the Being that is Good—but to do so consciously, of our own free choice. Back is the way forward—as T. S. Eliot so rightly insisted—but back as awake beings, exercising the proper choice of awake beings, instead of back to sleep:

and is taken home and has rough, violent sex (or even tender, caring sex), then what the hell does she expect?" In other words, I could have told her, in more philosophical terms, that she was Nietzsche's "pale criminal"—the person who at one moment dares to break the sacred law and at the next shrinks from paying the price.

Sometimes, when people have a low opinion of their own worth—or, perhaps, when they refuse responsibility for their lives—they choose a new acquaintance, of precisely the type who proved troublesome in the past. Such people don't believe that they deserve any better—so they don't go looking for it.

It's a good thing, not a selfish thing, to choose people who are good for you.

DO NOT DO WHAT YOU HATE

To discuss an event, particularly something emotional, like a death or serious illness, is to slowly choose what to leave behind.

The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.152 … Here we may reign secure, and in my choice To reign is worth ambition though in Hell: Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n.153

You must decide how much of your time to spend on this, and how much on that. You must decide what to let go, and what to pursue.

NOTICE THAT OPPORTUNITY LURKS WHERE RESPONSIBILITY HAS BEEN ABDICATED

Mathematicians can be persnickety about logical niceties. We're the kind of people who think it's funny, when asked, "Do you want soup or salad with that?" to reply, "Yes.

If you decide what color jelly beans to eat based just on the papers that get published, you're making the same mistake the army made when they counted the bullet holes on the planes that came back from Germany.

To act is literally to manifest preference about one set of possibilities, contrasted with an infinite set of alternatives. If we wish to live, we must act. Acting, we value.

You don't get to choose not to pay a price, you only get to choose which price you pay.

We're all free to chose some people to love, and then do it.

Por un instante pensó en ir a su laboratorio, pero volvió a su primitiva idea y continuó caminando en dirección a su casa. Un buen libro, de los que yo no se utilizaban, para practicar el viejo arte de la lectura.

Tenía que tomar la primera decisión. Llevar manga larga siempre, hasta en verano, o pasar de todo y dejar que el mundo las viera. También podía ponerse pulseras. Una docena de pulseras y abalorios.

Lo peor de las decisiones es que siempre se deben tomar, como mínimo, dos. Y se tome la que se tome, queda la incertidumbre de qué habría sucedido en el caso de tomar la otra.

La decadencia es ese tobogán que gobiernan los jóvenes: a partir de ahora las cosas son así, abuelo. Y la vejez consiste precisamente en no poder elegir y en tener que asimilarte por la fuerza a esa manga de ignorantes modernos que te ponen un revólver de futuro en la nuca. Se acabó lo que se daba. Te gusta o te vas, te adaptás o morís.

One must choose one's enemies carefully, as one ends up resembling them.